Re: PATCH: num3-mode for highlighting groups of digits in long numbers

[Michal Nazarewicz]

>> This time I bring to you a patch adding num3-mode which helps read long
>> numbers by alternating highlighting of group of digits in a long
>> number, so for instance something like:
>>
>>      12345678.12345678
>>
>> would be displayed as ("-" symbolising underscore):
>>
>>      12345678.12345678
>>        ---       ---
>>
>> This also works for hexadecimal numbers by grouping 4-digits at a time,
>> ie.:
>>
>>      0x0123456789ABCDEF
>>        ----    ----

On Fri, Sep 07 2012, Jambunathan K wrote:
> Just curious.
>
> Can we highlight like telephone numbers by creating an *extra* dash,
> space or a point.
>
> Tel no: 1234567890 rendered as
> Tel no: 12345-67890

If you ask whether it is theoretically possible than it is.  nxml-mode
has code to render entities, so the same mechanism can be used to add
dashes to separate numbers.

Still, this is not doable with num3-mode at this point.  Feel free to
hack support for it. :)  It should not be too hard -- just need to add
some defcustom variable and than modify -num3-put defun.

Note that this will work for any kind of *numbers*, so if you want to
treat some specific kind of numbers specially, like phone numbers, than
there will be more coding, probably including a different regex for
phone number detection (BTW. good luck with that, I've spent weeks on
my previous work doing something like that for Mozilla).

In general however, I see more problems with adding extra dashes than
uses.

> In some ways, the highlighting as seen above is in-band and not
> out-of-band (as underlines are).  It is also naturally how one would
> write down long numbers on a piece of paper for ease of reading.

I don't quite get your point here.

-- 
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.o. | Liege of Serenely Enlightened Majesty of      o' \,=./ `o
..o | Computer Science,  Michał “mina86” Nazarewicz    (o o)
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